


do they smoke cigarettes in heaven

by poetic_leopard



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Zombies, Alternative Universe w/ Canon Elements, Angst, Blood and Gore, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Minor Character Death, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, PTSD, Panic Attacks, Rating May Change, Slow Burn, Violence, Zombie Apocalypse, apocalypse-court, definitely took some inspiration from the last of us, i was so compelled to write this with all the zombie talk in the books, i've kept the characters as true to themselves as i can, other sensitive things that'll be brought up in future chapters, soft andreil
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-03
Updated: 2018-05-19
Packaged: 2019-03-13 03:49:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 17,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13562175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poetic_leopard/pseuds/poetic_leopard
Summary: The outbreak of a mysterious virus has desecrated the world as we know it. Neil Josten is a fugitive on the run from a dark past. Until he somehow finds himself in the midst of a caustic group of survivors who call themselves the Foxes, and meets Andrew Minyard—their deadliest investment. Can Neil learn to trust and shake the bloody shadow of his past; with both The Butcher and Martial Law hot on his trail, not to mention a terrifyingly real zombie threat at large?{TLDR: here's the obligatory zombie AU that i'm sure hasn't been done to death already. it's too late, y'all. i'm bringing this dead horse back to life. er, hopefully.}





	1. the runaway

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I do not claim to own any of the quotes borrowed from the books and all rights go to Nora Sakavic for her brilliant ability to leave me in a big sloppy puddle of my own feels.

>    _Digging up, tearing apart_  
>  _I, While escaping from the mirror,_  
>  _in the swamp surprisingly there are so many things to bury._  
>  _\- Yi Won_

* * *

Neil hits the ground hard and rounds the corner of the dilapidated gas station. His feet throb as if they might be burning to shreds but he runs, keeps running as fast as his weary bones will let him and shoves himself forward through the broken down door. He can hear their wailing in the near distance. They’re so close, he can detect their stench. The crawlers may not be fast, but their dead systems don’t protest against their mobility like Neil’s does.

The sky is tinted a hazy blood orange, Neil guesses there’s been another forest fire somewhere, the distinct thought of which makes Neil’s stomach give a violent lurch and he staggers; gasping as he smacks a hand up against the wall, leans over and pukes. He wants to breathe but the grief won’t stop piling up and clogging his windpipe. There’s bile at the back of his throat but it tastes better than the ashes. He can’t do this. How’s he supposed to _do_ this?

They’re drawing closer. He can hear them clearly now, like someone turned up the volume on radio static. Harsh and abrasive against his ears—still ringing from everything that keeled over and threatened to drown every inch of him.

There’s nothing left for him anymore—not that he had much to begin with. 

Neil can still feel the hot wetness of his mother’s blood against his skin, the smell of burning flesh lingers; carried tauntingly up by the wind like waste from an old meat factory. His mind won’t stop relaying images of her death. That final, merciless look in her eyes. The pledge of survival he made to her. _This isn’t happening. This can’t be happening._ Where is he supposed to go without her? What is he supposed to do? How’s he meant to go on…? His mother wasn’t a kind woman, and he lived like a tiny flame at the constant risk of being snuffed out beneath her thumb, but she was all he knew. Her scent, strong as apricot and nostril-stinging, the casual, calculating limn of her eyes; his strongest memories of her are all the same: her fingers anchored in his hair, asking him to stay silent, demanding him to disappear for the sake of both their lives. 

Everything he knows has been snatched from him and now there’s nothing—nothing but the dead and the taunting reminder of his own heartbeat.

Neil can see it all again, as if it hadn’t already played out in front of his eyes merely four fragile hours ago. Had it really been four hours? It could’ve been more. Hell, it could be days. He doesn’t think the passage of time matters anymore. 

His mother is dead. 

His mother has been dead now for four hours or four days or four years. 

He retches again and just as he leans back and wipes his mouth with the back of his wrist, something grabs ahold of his ankle. In a panicked frenzy, Neil brings his own foot down hard, but the sole of his shoe meets solid pillar. His toes curl painfully in on themselves before he trips and falls over, only to come face-to-face with a famished crawler.

Neil lets out a hissed breath and struggles against its death-grip as the thing leans over to wrap its arms around him in what could almost comically appear as an embrace. The crawler is so old that half the skin that had previously held its face together has come to rot away. It's wedged between the entrance of the gas station, merely a flailing torso. 

This can’t be what kills him. 

There is no chance in hell Neil is being _overpowered_ by a torso.

He leans as far away from the crawler’s mouth as he dares while still being pinned against it and digs a hand into its face to keep it at bay while he reaches for his back pocket and yanks out a shiv. Neil impels the shiv right in between the crawler’s sagging eyes. He’s done this so many times at this point that he’s memorized where the weapon must lodge in order to land a kill and could perform the action in his sleep. The crawler screeches wearily before crumpling against him in a lifeless heap.

Neil lets out a few ragged breaths before pulling the shiv out, peeling the creature off of him and getting shakily to his feet. He stares down at the conquered body that must’ve once belonged to a person. Alive and breathing—Neil takes note of the tattered, barely there clothes and the sparse clumps of hair still clinging to its skull. It’s reached a point of disfigurement so terrible that Neil can’t even make out a gender… That was what happened to them all, at least he’d given his mother a proper funeral and a pyre.

She won’t have to turn.

She will just be gone, and maybe just being gone is a mercy in this treacherous new world.

Neil kicks the straggler aside and steps into the gas station, which has turned into a playground for all sorts of vermin. There are roaches skittering beneath the dented vending machine, rats nesting within the corners and splatters of conspicuous stains on the floor that Neil doesn’t even want to bother decoding. There are still tattered posters up on the walls, advertising products that no longer have any use to people who no longer exist. There’s money in the cash register now rendered futile paper, ironically becoming the only thing survivors abandon during their raids. Half of the shelves are barren, but Neil does find some freeze dried goods and canned foods in the storage cabinet at the very back. He takes everything that’s remotely useful. Anything he cannot use to heal or eat is turned into a weapon of some creative kind. He snags three packets of cigarettes, one of which is so old that the sticks have turned black and fused together—he lets that one go. He feels the immediate urge to light one, but he doesn’t want to risk blowing up the gas station. Maybe he should blow up the gas station just to watch something else burn, but he doesn’t have the time or luxury.

Once he’s bagged everything and picked the gas station clean of supplies, he heads out again, sneaking out the back in case Riko Moriyama and his dogs are still on his trail.

They’re a malicious military group who dubbed themselves The Ravens; drunk on power and priding themselves on their fear mongering. They’ve been ordered to kill him and his mother on sight for venturing outside of the parameters of their delegated QZ but he’d been sure he’d shaken them off after he’d lost the shore and proceeded further inland. 

Neil can’t afford taking risks and it’s better to be safe than sorry. He needs to keep moving. _Has_ to.  

Momentarily, Neil turns back to stare at the devoid gas station. It’s the first safe place he’s encountered for miles and there are enough materials there that he can forge a makeshift barrier that will keep the crawlers out for the night. Everything within him is still busy unravelling and he’s in dire need of rest. He can’t even remember how long it’s been since he last slept. About a little over 38 hours easily. Then again, if he stops and slows down for one minute… That one minute of weakness could cost him his life or worse: his mind. If he’s on the move, he’s not thinking about her. If he’s on the move, he’s keeping his promise. 

Neil grabs his water bottle from the front pocket of his duffel bag and gulps in big sips. No matter how much water he consumes, his throat feels consistently parched. He sighs as he caps the bottle and puts it back in place. The woods are most definitely off-limits considering the air suggests embers and by his calculations, he’s still within the outskirts of the city. Neil’s not quite sure what lurks within the city in itself, but he figures it’s a better bet than anything else. There will probably be militia on the prowl, but if he can just get past this inexhaustible stretch of highway…

He’s quickly running out of options. 

The longer he spends stagnant the quicker his mind deteriorates and his sleepless body fails him. He has to keep going, and so he does—even if it’s beginning to feel like he’s trapped within a recurring nightmare with no foreseeable end.

* * *

They’re gaining on him. His legs are on fire. The edges of his vision are beginning to darken and blur into a mirage of oblong shapes.

There are emergency alarms going off in the distance and they might as well be funeral bells. He crossed the city borders directly into the military’s eager arms. The Ravens have caught up to him and they’re hellbent on a kill. He’s far enough away from the gas station that there’s no turning back now, and he lost the option of burning to death in a forest hours ago. It’s mostly a puzzle of craggily buildings now, drooping upon one another like a miniature clay set of a city left to melt in the sun. There’s smoke furling up from the rust-caked rooftops, sunken cars waist-deep in mud and algae with bloodied windshields and blown out tires, all busted and overturned; some of which still carry undead passengers. They’re a bunch of human cobwebs strapped to their seat belts at this point. 

The whole city’s been reduced to a premonition of death, some twisted god’s idea of hell. 

There’s foliage sprouting from the sides of buildings like newly formed skin. There’s overspill from the sewers devoid of maintenance. There’s bodies.

There’s so many bodies.

Neil wants to avoid looking at the dead but it’s hard not to notice. A half-eaten leg hanging grotesquely in the air from a fourth story window, a small body with its head gored open, a woman with a swollen stomach now a feast for maggots— Neil’s gaze snaps back to the alleyway in front of him, teeming with crawlers, some of which are pinned to the barbed wire like kebabs on sticks. The blaring of the alarms is an incessant reminder of ambush. He waits, watches, watches, he hears the squelch of tires before the eerie silence is foiled by raging gunfire. 

 _Think, think. Quick_. Neil’s rendered immobile before he frantically makes a decision—an awful decision brought on by an utter lack of any other plausible outcomes but a decision nonetheless. He makes a beeline for the crawler-infested alleyway. There is nowhere else to go. 

He’s flanked by death on all sides but he’s not going to bite it that easy. 

This time, the green-suits are not even spouting nonsense about safety in surrender, they’re just going to open fire until kingdom fucking come. 

He won’t be killed here. 

He won’t be killed by people who work under a worthless, sleaze shit of a human being.

There’s an imaginary bulb that lights up in his brain. The crawlers are already flocking towards The Ravens’ vehicle due to the uproar of bullets sounding off, but maybe Neil can introduce a catalyst that could at least temporarily override their resources. Neil crouches down behind a crevice in the alley and frantically searches for a lighter. It takes him a solid minute of flinching at every shot that misses him by a hair’s breadth until he finally gets his hands on it. Neil then flicks it on and through the corner of his eye, aims for as close to The Raven’s vehicle as seemingly possible.

The men up on the roof of the truck seem to be requesting for backup. Neil can’t make out a single one of their faces but he doesn’t need to for the boiling hate within him to manifest a roiling spring. He despises everything about them, their hardened expressions, their identical uniforms, their stocky rifles.

_Okay, okay. If I screw up this strike… It’s game over._

_I’m done for._

_I’m fucked in this rat-trap._

They can’t see him, but he can hear their boots pounding against the ground like a thousand angry heartbeats. They’re going to try to pursue him on foot. Time is peeling away from him. Does he have enough time? He has to try. Neil unzips his duffel bag and produces an empty bottle and the canister of oil he’d snagged from the gas station earlier. Just as he’s about to dig out his final ingredient, one of the Ravens sneaks up on him. He goes to speak into his telecom and raise his weapon, but Neil leaps to his feet and lunges at the man. They struggle against one another as Neil clambers onto The Raven’s back, digs his nails into his throat with one hand and snatches the rifle from his arms with the other, only to knock him in the jaw with it using as much strength as he can muster. He can’t let them catch sight of him again. Luckily, their rampant gunshots drown out the sounds of the man’s deliberately loud grunts. Neil jumps off and grabs the Raven’s yielding arms before he drops to the ground and drags his unconscious body behind the crevice with him, out of view. He then pours half a liter of soap into the bottle before ripping at his t-shirt sleeve with his teeth to use to plug the mouth of the bottle. Neil lights it and watches the flames begin to work their magic before hurling the flaming bottle at where the Ravens are still sprawling near their beloved vehicle.

His father had always stressed on taking precise aim.

_Wait for it…_

The molotov cocktail goes off with a bright, earth-shattering flare. 

The crawlers gathered within the alley are instantly drawn to the chaos, and begin to make their raggedy ways up towards the entrapped Ravens. Neil hears someone’s panicked call for an immediate retreat and then another barrage of gunfire followed by screaming. Neil lets out a relieved sigh only to realize he’s about to be trampled by a horde of crawlers heading directly past him.

Shit. _Shit!_ He hadn’t thought this stupid plan through.

There is a way to camouflage oneself to be undetected by the crawlers but he doesn’t exactly have time to embalm himself in blood and guts. When it hits him, Neil swiftly grabs the immobilized Raven and pulls him up towards his chest, wielding his body like a human shield. If the crawlers make their way towards him, they’ll feast on the Raven and Neil can slip covertly by from underneath him. 

It was cooler in theory.

Some of the crawlers abandon the flames to sink their decaying teeth into the Raven’s flesh and Neil attempts to remain as still as he can beneath the body, now consequently being eaten alive. He doesn’t dare move. He doesn’t dare breathe. His pulse is rapid. He’s going to have a heart attack. He won’t survive this. How will he survive this? He just sacrificed someone’s life to keep himself alive, even if it is Raven scum it feels like a brand new moral barricade coming down like a mighty avalanche of aversion.  
  
_There is a man dying right on top of me._

_Am I making you proud, mom?_

It is what she would have done.  
  
He waits for remorse—instead all Neil feels is the need to find a way _out._   

Time comes to a grinding halt.

Neil shoves the forgone Raven off of him and makes a break for it. The crawlers pile atop of him like a stack of sentient, writhing dominoes. Neil cuts through the crowd, struggles and thrashes and twists but there’s so many of them. He can see his mother’s face clear as day, paling and purple and the blood matting her scalp… He can feel her hands clinging to his as the life is slowly drained out of her and her fingers stilling against his own. His chest is beginning to cave in. He can feel it like a fist tightening around his middle, crushing him to death.

He can taste his own fear. 

Maybe it’s just the taste of the crawlers ensnaring him.

Somehow through all that—he sees it, just past the barbed wire fences.

There’s a clearing.

By pure luck, he manages to bring his shiv out of his pocket and begins to clock them one by one despite the horde disabling him. He doesn’t know how many of them he manages to kill. It all happens within a frenzied daze. His shiv gets stuck in one of their skulls and he abandons it, mustering to push past them and climbing the barbed wire fence to hop onto the other side. His palms are throbbing. He can feel the blisters forming as he collapses onto the ground so hard he hears his spine give an awful crack. 

He slumps against the ground, closes his eyes and listens to the sound of air shuddering in and out of him for what feels like minutes or days. Something wet trickles down the side of his forehead. There’s a dim awareness at the back of his mind but the pain is too great, too hellbent on his end. The crawlers stick their hands out for him through the fencing, their jaws open wide. In his delirium, it’s almost like they’re begging for salvation of some kind, their hands outstretched in hopes of blessing, their mouths ever-hungry for the lost cause split open in front of them.

It’s not just that. His pants’ leg is slashed open and there’s blood-splattered barbed wire wedged in his lower thigh, sticking out just beneath his knee. But… There’s a pain that’s even worse. A pain so completely mind numbing it snatches all forms of conceivable thought. Neil’s world is sized down to the whims of the pain. It begins in his forehead and spreads from there on out. In between choked out gasps, Neil manages to cock his head to the side and peel his sleeve up.  

His heart evaporates at the sight. 

There’s a large, fresh bite blooming across his forearm.

 _No… How… Why…_  

_I’m sorry, mom._

The darkness licks at his vision and then there’s nothing.

* * *

Neil knows he should be dead.

Instead, he’s alive and unable to put a finger on why.

Instead, he’s wading through a pool of sludge in what was once the conventional subway. Instead, he knows that if the bite doesn’t kill him soon, whatever bacteria’s swimming around in all this build-up of dirty water definitely will. There’s chances of encampments outside of the martial law’s radius. It would certainly be wise to put a swamp of a subway in between an illegal settlement and the rest of the city, just outside of the military’s reach.

Neil’s hoping his instincts aren’t fucking with him because he’s running crucially low on supplies. It would be the ideal time to happen upon an encampment that he can raid and pilfer goods from. He’s developed into a bit of a myth over the last few months around the encroaching camps for being ‘The Fox’ who makes small, swift robberies every blue moon before vanishing back into the night.

The Fox never targets the same place twice, which is why he's come to garner a reputation like chicken pox. 

Once you've been infected, you're immune. 

He's to strike again.

Of course, that is assuming he makes it out of this hellhole, also assuming he isn’t immediately killed by whatever is waiting on the other end.

He is weaker now than he’s ever been, his system desperately attempting to keep itself running despite every encountered hiccup. He’s injured and possibly infected and he’s pretty sure word must’ve reached back to Riko about what had become of the truck full of Ravens’ that had been hot on his pursuit. 

His eyes are sore, his stomach is painfully empty but he can’t stop until he finds somewhere safe to hold up in. Just being off the military’s radar doesn’t make things all sugar and plums. That’s not even half of it. The most dangerous part about being on the outside is that there are worse predators than the crawlers and armed forces.

The outside world is the Butcher’s domain. His men are rampant, resilient and faster on their feet than the dead. They’re also about as prevalent as cockroaches.. Somehow having a meddling hand in every subdivision, whether government controlled or rebel established.

Everything that isn’t under Martial law is fair game, and yet, Neil knows for a fact that they do underhand jobs for the government too, cutting deals with the military forces in order to keep clambering up the newfangled food chain. The Butcher’s people do what they want and the military looks the other way. That’s how it goes. How it always goes. Neil can feel the Butcher’s influence in everything he finds himself surrounded by, whispering his name, taunting him. Riko and his men have also done business with his father in the past, which is why the terrible feeling settling inside him now is threatening to render him dead meat. All Riko has to do is spread the word about Neil’s little fireworks show to the Butcher and that’s the end of the line.

He isn’t nicknamed the Butcher for nothing: his weapon of choice is a cleaver. All of his men are well-versed in knife-fighting, and more than one of them have tried to stick Neil like a pig. The man is a vicious, merciless piranha with a psychotic streak. Even Before, he’d been an awful, murdering man, but the apocalypse has not only given him the opportunity to stake his claim on the world, but it’s brought rise to the demon within him. While the Ravens’ are pretty much just following military orders for the sake of their own survival and satiating themselves on whatever scraps of impact they’re able to hold, the Butcher wields true power. He kills for the sake of it, for his own amusement—he mutilates both the alive and the dead. He is a megalomaniac that knows no rhyme or reason. The FBI had put together a specialized task force purely to bring the man down. Now that there are no rules or laws, he will never have to fear being sent to prison for his crimes. His brutality will know no end and Neil is sure he will find some way for his despicable legacy to thrive even long after he’s dead and gone.

His father cannot find out that Neil’s alive. 

The Butcher won’t hesitate to tear Neil down—piece by piece, where he stands. He’ll do it slowly, he’ll make it hurt like a lobotomy. He’s still feeling betrayed after his mother took Neil by the hand and ran off to god-knows-where. This is the man who his mother was trying to put him so far apart from, but is it possible to outrun someone whose power is seemingly omnipresent? 

It’s why Neil can never trust anyone. 

He can no longer tell the difference between who’s under his father’s thumb and who isn’t. Everyone seems like a puppet, victim to his strings. It wouldn’t be a surprise if there’s nobody left, if every survivor that’s left has been converted to a brainwashed slave—undead in a completely different way. Neil sighs and lets the thoughts ebb away. There’s a sudden, swishing sound. Neil’s heart leaps into his mouth as he shines his flashlight in the direction of the noise and sighs when he realizes it’s just a rat chewing on a stack of welting newspaper.

There is a train car towards his left, lying flattened against the wall in a deadened heap. The damp walls crawl with insects and the soupy stench of sewage makes Neil’s nostrils sting. Neil is glad that the crawlers can’t exactly swim, but there are still floaters every now and again. He’s wearing a sort of makeshift brace with every sharp object he could get his hands on poking out of it: scissors, needles, sticks, poles. It slows down his momentum but keeps the crawlers at an arm’s length. It takes him another hour and a half but he finally makes it out of the dreary depths of the subway station.

It is midday outside, warm and overcast. The light is pale and weightless against his skin, but Neil is just content to be able to sense the presence of the sun again. The subway journey had felt like an endless night. Neil carefully undoes his brace and leans against a pillar to catch his breath. The area is barren and the road that winds in front of him seems long and winding into nowhere. There doesn’t seem to be any signs of life here, but there’s a suspicious lack of crawlers lurking about the streets. He rests his head against the hard brick of a dilapidated old building and allows himself a moment of rest. He hadn’t realized how incredibly tired he was. His breaths sound eerily similar to the shrill groans of the crawlers.

The moment lasts too long and Neil feels his eyelids getting heavier as he falls into a short, dreamless sleep. 

When he wakes, he is not alone.

He can smell… _Is that cigarette smoke?_

Every instinct in him poises to flee but before he can even pull himself fully awake and lift himself up off of the ground—light glints off of a weapon that’s coming down too fast for Neil to be able to figure out what it even is. The stranger takes a swing and something slams into his gut hard enough to crush his lungs into his spine. He turns over on his hands and knees, scrabbling ineffectually at the ground as he tries to breathe. He’d puke if he could only manage that first gasp, but his body refuses to cooperate. There’s a buzzing in his ears now, and a voice, sounding seemingly faraway, cuts through the monotone.

“Hey, Renee,” mutters an unceremoniously chirpy voice. “Look what I found!”

The world crackles black, then comes into too-sharp focus as air finally hits Neil’s tortured lungs. Neil inhales so sharply he chokes, and every wracking cough threatens to shake him apart. He wraps an arm around his middle to hold himself together and slants a fierce look up at his assailant. Neil gawks despite himself. The stranger in front of him couldn’t be taller than five mere feet as he balances a beaten-up racquet on his shoulders. His hair is a disheveled blond mess pulled flimsily back with a black bandana and there’s a cigarette lounging on the corner of his mouth. Contradictory to the mirth in his voice, there is something deadened and glazed over in his eyes and his mouth wears a thin, pursed line. What’s even more stunning is that he looks like he might actually be right about Neil’s age or perhaps younger.

Neil knows he should get to his feet immediately to engage and disarm these interlopers, they could be the Butcher’s underlings for all he knows, but he can barely move without his body protesting rather unbearably. 

Neil tries to ignore the way his stomach is thrumming, like a second heart. 

The assailant picks up Neil’s contraption of a brace to examine it and nods, tone betraying neither approval nor distaste. “Crafty,” he murmurs. “I think I’ll keep it.”

_Like hell you will, asshole._

Neil watches a woman trudge up to his assailant but she stops dead in her tracks when she notices Neil and lets out a small gasp.    

“Oh my goodness,” her voice is soft, almost pleasant. “He’s alive.”

“Mm, yes,” his assailant’s eyes slant towards her as he drops Neil’s brace to the ground like yesterday’s trash. His tone betrays inconvenience. “How disconcerting.” 

“Why did you have to hit him? He doesn’t look like he can stand let alone attack us.” The woman demands. Neil stares up at her. Her short, haphazardly cut hair is an oil spill of rainbow, the colors now rather muted from exposure to the dry air, but still prominent enough to be discernible. She wears an army jacket and a crucifix glints at the base of her neck. There’s a blood-stained knife curled snugly in her right hand.

“You’d rather I let him go? Put a band-aid on him and he’ll be good as new.”

“Fuck you,” Neil spits, glaring daggers at his assailant, before turning to face the woman. “Who are you people?”

He needs to play the clueless card and assess the enemy before doing anything stupid on a whim. If they try to kill him, he’s sure he can strike them down. First, he needs to figure out if they’re connected to the Butcher in some way, which they most likely will be.

“I’m afraid I must ask you the same question,” the woman—Neil assumes is the aforementioned Renee—responds gently, while his assailant crouches down, pulls Neil’s bag towards him and begins to unzip it. 

“What do you think you’re—“

 _“Shh,”_ a knife appears at his jugular. “Make a sudden move and I won’t hesitate to slice you apart.” Neil has never seen reflexes that quick, it’s as if he’d pulled the knife out of thin air. It’s only a few disorienting seconds later that he notices the thick armbands the man is wearing on either arm, explaining the magically appearing weapon. The man begins to one-handedly go through all of Neil’s stuff, while still holding the blade to his throat like a fatal promise.

Renee takes a cautious step forward, expression a calm mix of vigilance and inquisitiveness.

“How did you get past the subway station?”

“I swam,” Neil snaps, still eyeing the cold metal held up against his skin. “It’s not lava.”

Neil’s assailant finishes snooping through his belongings before grabbing Neil harshly by the collar and pulling him up to his feet. He then advances swiftly forward, causing Neil to take an instinctive step backwards, until he reels into the pillar and Neil’s spine meets jagged wall. He is now impossibly trapped in between the wall and his assailant, who digs the sharp blade ever-so-deeper into his skin.

Neil’s breath escapes in short, wary gasps.

_Damnit._

Neil does not enjoy being cornered. The memories it brings gushing back are venomous and unpleasant; turning his skin inside out. Phantom pain erupts inside his throat, his gut drops into his toes. 

“Andrew,” there’s a warning tone in Renee’s voice.

Before his assailant—Andrew, can offer up a response, there’s a sound like a dying engine, except high-pitched and piercing; coming from the opposite direction. 

“You deal with the dead freaks,” Andrew’s blade is too close for comfort, Neil attempts to wrest it from his grasp, but that only makes Andrew drive the heel of his foot right into his sore thigh, leading Neil’s knees to unflatteringly buckle. “I’ll handle the live one.” 

“We don’t know if he's a threat yet, so please try not to kill him.” Renee calls, before whirling around and taking off in the direction of the disturbance. “Don’t you want to go and help your friend?” Neil prods.

“Do I look stupid?” Andrew asks, unamused.

“Want me to answer that?” Neil challenges.

“I won't play games. Understood? You are trespassing.” His breath is hot against Neil’s face—  
  
—but Neil won't give an inch. “I didn't see your name engraved on any of the walls.” 

“What are you doing here?” Andrew grills, clearly uninterested in skirting around the bush.

Neil gulps against the fatal expanse of the knife. “Same as you.” 

“No, _I’m_ not trying to take what isn’t mine. Low on goodies, are you?” 

Neil stares at the man in front of him, the prominent veins that line his biceps and the broad jut of his shoulders notwithstanding, there is something undeniably menacing about him. His glare circles like a cudgel, his strength is palpable and his expression relays the truth—he isn’t messing around. His tone of voice may be off-handed, but Neil suddenly has the feeling that one wrong step could lead to his imminent death… yet there’s something tragically pedestrian about his movements, like the idea of the kill in itself bores him.

This does not seem like the Butcher’s usual hire.

“Who do you work for?” Neil demands.

Andrew actually tilts his head at this, just as Renee returns. “I’ll be the one asking the questions. Do not make the mistake of trying to interview me again.”

Renee stops short. There’s blood matting her forehead and she’s got her army jacket tied around her waist, but she seems otherwise unharmed. 

“I’m assuming the fact that you haven’t killed him yet proves that he isn’t an immediate threat,” she says, before offering Neil a smile. “My name is Natalie Shields, but I go by Renee, and this is my friend, Andrew. I apologize on his behalf. Do you think you’ll be okay? You must be exhausted and hungry.” 

Neil gapes at her. He has never met her type before. Andrew’s viciousness he can comprehend, but this rare… kindness? It can’t be authentic. There must be an angle here that she’s playing at. Andrew drops his knife, making Neil’s attention shift back to him. Before Neil can make a sound of surprise, Andrew lands another knee into his gut. Neil sucks in a breath that sounds like a broken whistle before lapsing into coughs and splutters, black spots like fevers developing in front of his eyes.

“Renee,” Andrew mumbles. “We’re going.” 

“What?” Renee and Neil posit the question at the same time.

Andrew looks bored all of a sudden, like he’s lost all previously invested interest. Neil drives a hand into his aching gut, his vision returning.

“What happened to slicing me apart?” Neil asks, right before the stray, logical voice in his head berates him for it. His body burns from the force of Andrew’s strike. 

“There’s no point,” Andrew replies, before glancing at a baffled Renee and then back at Neil, his gaze trailing downwards. “You’re infected.”

Neil follows Andrew’s gaze to the bite mark still gracing his forearm and begins to shake his head, rather vigorously. “No. That’s—I’m not—“ he stops himself. 

_What am I doing? They think I’m dying. They’re letting me go. I should just let them let me go._

Renee strides forward in order to take a closer look and then frowns down at Neil. “May I?” she asks, and when Neil nods, she carefully holds his arm up to inspect it.

“That’s strange,” she mutters. “That’s thickening skin… Andrew, it looks like it’s healing.”

“Your blind faith is playing tricks on you again,” Andrew snaps. “Let’s go.” 

Renee ignores Andrew and meets Neil’s avoidant gaze instead. “How many hours has it been since you got bitten?”

“Three weeks.”

_Shit._

Renee and Andrew exchange an indistinct look. 

“Seth turned within two days of being infected and that’s the longest I’ve ever known anyone to bear the bite before…” Renee’s voice trails off. “Wymack will want to see this.”

“You trust this parasite?” Andrew’s gaze on Neil is hawk-like and unforgiving. 

“I trust my instincts,” Renee persists, as she steps back and places her hands on her thighs. “I know this is asking for a lot, but how would you like to come back to our encampment with us? I’m not trying to overwhelm you, but I think your condition could potentially be world-changing. I know I must sound like I'm getting ahead of myself but... There—There might be hope of a cure here. Or… at least an answer. Surely you must be curious as well.” 

“Why should I trust either of you?”

“You shouldn’t,” Renee says, to his surprise. “Trust is not something that comes easily—to anyone these days. You have no reason to trust us just as we have no reason to trust you. Trust requires time to be built—slowly and carefully. I’m just putting down the first brick.” 

“That's very poetic,” Neil says. “I’m sorry if I can’t take you for your word.” 

“That’s fair,” Renee offers him a sheepish smile. “Here’s how I see it. We haven’t killed each other yet and in my book that counts for something.”

“Oh Mother Mary,” Andrew twists his lips derisively. “Spare the rest of the routine for the sermon.”

Neil shoots Andrew a look. “Then we agree on something.” Renee isn’t remotely wounded by Andrew’s taunting comments, instead she only seems to steel herself further. If there’s one thing Neil can admire about that, it’s got to be her calm demeanor and unwavering patience. “Look. You don’t seem like you’ve been doing too well. I’m pretty sure Andrew’s convinced you were attempting to steal from us; while that may be the case, we all perform unforeseen acts out of desperation. If you agree to come with us, you can get that injury patched up. We have real food and clean water and _people_. Nobody makes it out there all by themselves. Not for long.” Renee continues. “We have a _community_.” Determination is ambient in her bright eyes.  

“Yeah. Until you don’t.” Neil’s voice is flat.

Andrew perks up at this. “Is that a threat?”

“No,” Neil sighs. “Just how it goes.”

“This is about more than just us,” Renee insists. “Your system could have developed a new type of antibody.”

“I’m not anyone’s lab rat.” 

“Of course not. You will be treated like a human being. I ensure you. Nothing will take place against your will. Just please consider it.”

Neil feels an overwhelming tiredness wash over him all of a sudden. Her words are enchanting, and his leg/head/gut are all pounding. Will it be so bad to go ahead? If these people are gullible enough to allow him to join them... He can make a break for it in the morning. He doesn’t have to stay forever. This woman is offering him pointless promises of hope, but all he needs is shelter for the night, to gather some supplies, and then he can be off again. Something inside him tells him there’s no way these people could be affiliated with the Butcher—the Butcher’s lackies wouldn’t have cared if he was infected, they would never leave without delivering a lasting blow. If they knew there was even the slightest hope of a cure, they’d do everything in their power to snuff it.

Unless… This is all some kind of an elaborate trap, yet another violent game of cat-and-mouse orchestrated by Daddy Dearest.

He thinks of his mother, six feet below the ground. He remembers her plea, but there’s something empty about it.

 _If I’m really the secret to an antidote… Does that mean my life will actually mean something?_  

Neil has spent his entire life on the run. He doesn't even know the person he’s become, the person that he’s saved on countless occasions. His life was never going to amount to anything, ensuring his own survival had been the only notion of any importance. 

_If I’m an antidote that means it meant something. That means I am something, at least._

He can’t take it anymore.

He’ll figure things out as he goes along. 

Right now… Just for a moment, maybe he’ll indulge himself this one lie.

Hope is a foolish rose-tinted dream, but it’s gotten him this far, hasn’t it?


	2. speech of foxes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: I do not claim to own any of the quotes borrowed from the books and all rights go to Nora Sakavic for her brilliant ability to leave me in a big sloppy puddle of my own feels + a shoutout to Fall, my beta, for sparing me a bunch of embarrassing grammatical errors! :)

>    _What can you know about a person? They shift in the light. You can't light up all sides at once._  
>  _-Richard Siken_

* * *

He can’t keep his hands still.

His fingers don’t feel like his own. They quiver. They bleed. They’re all too breakable. He balls them into fists and discards them to his sides, like a pair of used shovels. He’s trying to get rid of his mother’s voice inside his head. _Don’t be stupid. Don’t hesitate. Don’t look back. Pull yourself up—no matter how painful it might be, and run._ The usual background static develops into an encore. He’s not meant to be taking detours, he’s a vehicle built for escape.

She’s not here, though, is she?

Not anymore. She administered every airtight rule, and to what end? She died in vain. She died and she spent her last moments drilling into him the reminder; that he’d be a coward not to keep going. Sometimes Neil wonders if his mother ever lived for herself. If during the time before he was born, she’d ever known what it’s like to not live every waking moment in fear.

There is a part of Neil that is so incredibly enraged at her for dying that it burns the route to every other emotion straight out of his body. His chest begins to feel air-tight again, and he has to bite down on his tongue to keep from letting out a noise akin to that of a strangled animal, and focus on the breath ripping in and out of his lungs, to ground himself in the moment.

His hands still shake, but buried beneath his knuckles, they’re braced for a fight all the same.

He watches the pair of strangers, standing at a proximity that allows them to maintain an eye on him while keeping their conversation out of earshot. They spend over a minute arguing in hushed voices. Neil doesn’t miss the dull yet undoubtedly scathing looks Andrew keeps turning on him, but chooses not to react. He waits for a verdict, his mind already mapping out potential escape routes.

They settle on something.

Andrew falls back in acquiescent silence as Renee offers him a tired, but encouraging smile. Idly, Neil can’t help but wonder what it is that Renee might have said to sway the vote in his favor. Andrew may be complaisant for now, but he doesn’t look remotely happy about it. His eyes hold a dark fluidness that Neil recognizes; a pair of unsheathed knives.

Neil knows he’s probably going to come to regret his decision as soon as Renee starts to lead the way back to their encampment. He should have ran as soon as she had opened her mouth, lies and unrealistic promises spilling out.. He got caught up in a momentary fantasy and now he’s been stripped of every upper hand he previously had the advantage of bearing. The back of his shirt sticks to his spine in a sheen of sweat. The clouds have parted and the sun sits like a fried egg on the horizon, fat and runny; the streets bathed in its stale, relentless light.

The back end of town seems to have been wiped mostly clear of crawlers, except for the occasional stragglers: less of a threat of hordes. They pass hefty trucks, strategically parked, with their backs loaded to the brim with wooden planks. They are sticking out at obtuse angles, efficient traps to keep out intruders of both the alive and dead variety. The streets are barren enough that even the air smells less like death here—more wheat field and mildew. It clearly used to be one of the more upper class neighborhoods before everything went to shit. The warm palette of sun-washed roofs atop the townhouses that line the streets give Neil a sense of faux-security as he takes it in, the structures still withstanding despite taking years of damage. Most of the front windows have been shattered from raids and break-ins or caved in naturally due to wear and tear. They have the same weatherbeaten and dejected look about them as a child’s toy that’s been spat and stomped on.

Neil flinches uncomfortably, just as Andrew, who trails behind him, gives him a solid kick to the shin.

As sharp pain swarms to his leg, Neil halts immediately, leading Andrew to stop, only just avoiding walking into Neil’s back. Andrew had upended his duffel bag onto the ground and seized all of his weapons, one of which he now has held up against the bottom of Neil’s spine.

“I’m not going to make this entire journey with you pressing my own gun to my back.”

”No?” Andrew plays dumb.

“Shoot me,” Neil says, turning on his heel so that the barrel now presses up against his stomach. “Or drop the gun.”

“Why don’t you make me?” Andrew taunts, voice a low-slur.

“Hey,” Renee chimes in. “He’s unarmed. You made sure of that.”

Andrew steadies his vice-gaze on Neil and digs the barrel of the gun further into the cloth of his shirt. “Oh, Renee. Dangerous men are double the threat unarmed. You know this.”

Neil feels a jolt skitter down his spine.

The fact that Andrew is taking him seriously unsettles Neil. He’s used to adversaries, his fathers men or the random straggler, underestimating him. It raises the question in Neil’s mind of what Andrew has seen to consider Neil a threat.

Did Neil’s duffel give him away, or had Andrew known all along?

“Neil seems like a smart person. I’m sure he knows better than to pull anything when he’s outmanned and outgunned. Don’t you think?” Renee slides a wry look his way, a prettily packaged warning obvious in her words.

“Of course.” Neil says, coolly. He won’t let himself get undermined. 

Andrew doesn’t waver, instead he stares Neil down—hard. Beneath a pale umbrella of lashes, his irises are coated in acid. “I will blow your guts out all over this road.”

Neil doesn’t let his own gaze drop as he glares back with what he hopes is an equal amount of intensity.

“Go ahead,” he growls, lowly. “Good luck finding another test subject.”

“That’s enough,” Renee says, tone still impossibly crystal and polite. “Please hand me the gun, Andrew.”

There is a moment of silence so tense it forms over them like a welt, then Andrew loosens his grip, making a whole show of allowing the gun to clatter to the ground in front of him, before advancing on; rebalancing his racquet along his shoulders as he goes. Renee snatches the gun off of the ground, checking to make sure the safety’s turned on and slips it back into her pocket.

Neil stares blankly at her until she breaks into a cheerful smile. “I know it didn’t feel like it, but that was a win on our part. Let’s keep moving, okay?”

 _Our?_ Is she seriously roping them together, attempting to manipulate him into a fallacious sense of unity? Neil can handle a thousand guns to the stomach, but pixie-shaped girls with sugary demeanours and a penchant for blood—not so much.

Andrew and Renee’s group are based in what once used to be known as Palmetto State University, the campus of which they have all to themselves after they wiped out the grounds previously awash with the undead. It isn’t a bad bet. The street surrounding the university buildings is long and winding, cutting off out into the freeway. The parking lot seems to have been cleared out to make space for loading and patrol vehicles. The buildings that must’ve once stood tall and proud, now seem shrunken, almost as if they’ve been slouching. The bricks however look sturdy, despite being half-eaten by moss and lichen. The wide, European-style gates seem to be caked in splotches of rust and spiralling vines of foliage reclaim every untrampled inch. There are tattered school flags still hoisted up front, fluttering ominously in the wind, and beyond the gates are massive pillars that have been converted into lookout towers. Neil can spot a well maintained lawn that looks untouched by the ruination of everything else. They must be equipped with a hell of a lawnmower. It all seems brutally aglow in the washed out glare of the setting sun.

“Quite impressive, right?” Renee smiles, nudging his shoulder in what’s probably meant to be a show of good nature. Neil isn’t sure. “It didn’t come easy, but Wymack could convince us all into moving hell and earth if he so wished.”

“Is he the one in charge around here?”

“Something like that.”

Andrew—who’s relegated to not sparing Neil a single acknowledging glance— parks himself in front of the gate and waits. Renee and Neil follow suit until a voice from somewhere above Neil calls out to them. “Back already?” Renee shields her eyes from the light and grins up at someone. “We made a bit of a detour.”

The person at the watchtower points to Neil. “Deadweight?”

“Survivor.”

“Shouldn’t we be consulting Wymack before—“

“Will you trust me, Dan?”

There’s a pause before the gates slowly creak open and they step through. As soon as they’re on the inside, Andrew floats off in another direction and the person stationed at the watchtower climbs down to join them. A woman with dark, closely cropped hair and fierce eyes. There’s a certain daunting elegance to the way she stands with her shoulders rolled back and her chest held out; despite displaying a perfectly cordial demeanor, there's an edge to her. Neil can’t help but think that she seems like the kind of woman his mother would get along with. Dan scans Neil from head-to-toe before turning to Renee, expression demanding an explanation.

“Where’s Wymack?” Renee asks, not wasting any time getting to the point.

“Your best bet’s the cafeteria. I think he promised Abby he’d help her cook tonight.”

“Doesn’t he say that every night?”

“I think she finally wore him down.”

“I’ll have him call on a group meeting.”

“Alright,” Dan says, offering Renee a toothy smile. “I’m gonna postpone all my "what-the-hell’s" for later, then.”

Neil is just glad he doesn’t have to do any of the explaining himself, at least not as of yet, considering he himself isn’t sure why he’s going along with any of this in the first place.

He’s too busy wondering where Andrew ventured off to, considering the man still has every single one of his possessions. Neil _has_ to get them back one way or another. Even if he does have to fight Andrew for it. He must be keeping the duffel so that he can examine some of the items—namely the leatherbound notebook and array of passports—up close in his own time. Neil doesn’t feel comfortable leaving his things at the mercy of somebody like him. The duffel may seem merely like some vagabond’s essentials on the surface, but anyone with a keen eye would decipher the crucial cues it contains. Something that could easily lead a skeptic like Andrew to grow even more suspicious of who he _really_ is, if he spares an idle thought to it. The mere idea spawns an urgency like no other.

Neil’s chest is hot with uncertainty, but he follows Renee through the entrance of what he assumes is the main building and feels something in his chest further ignite. These halls smell _lived_ in—there’s a very distinct smell to them that Neil can’t exactly put into words but it’s old shoes and scented candles and laundered clothes and grapefruit air freshener. It’s almost home-like, not that Neil’s an expert. To top that off, the halls are clean except for old dried blood stains, graffiti and assorted posters from back when this was still an operating university. There’s a raggedy vending machine that looks like it’s being serviced as a ping-pong table, a classroom with chairs arranged in the form of a cinema hall and damp clothes hanging from makeshift strings across the ceilings, probably to avoid them being damaged by bad weather. Neil can’t place this queasy feeling slow-burning within him, the strangest of misplaced yearnings.

“The cafeteria is just here down the hall,” Renee explains. “You must be starving, right? I’m sure Abby can whip you something to eat.” He hates how uncomfortable this woman makes him. The quicker he’s away from her shadow, the sooner he’ll be able to think straight.

“Thank you,” Neil mutters, quietly, because he does not know how else to react to such courteousness. “Actually, your boyfriend’s still holding my stuff hostage. I’m going to need that back if you’re expecting me to go along with any of this.”

“He isn’t my boyfriend,” says Renee, calmly. “And you must understand why he did it. It’s just precaution. You can’t be too careful with everyone choosing to act like a monster nowadays. Wouldn’t you have done the same thing in our place? If it’s just the supplies you require, we have plenty of those to go around. If it’s sentimentals you’re worried about, Andrew doesn’t care for anything that’s not a weapon. They’ll be returned to you.”

“I’m emotionally attached to my shivs.” Neil deadpans.

To his surprise, Renee actually laughs. “Yeah, I know the feeling.”

They push past the double-doors into the cafeteria, which smells good enough that it makes Neil’s stomach growl embarrassingly loud. The room in itself is large and spacious, most of the excess chairs and tables have been pushed off to one side to make space for the few still in use. The large windows towards the left provide a satisfactory view of the back-lawns, the fences of which stand boarded up and barbed. Neil can almost feel the presence of a hundred-something student's ghosts milling about the uncharacteristically empty setting.

“Well, fuck me!” A deep, booming voice from the kitchen. “This lasagna. It’s like opium on the palette.”

“Wymack?” Renee calls, and a minute later, a large man steps out in front of them. Neil is slightly taken aback by him, not because of the tribal flame tattoos that curl out from under his sleeves or due to his commendable height, but because of the seasoned look on his face. There’s something gruff and irritable about him, and yet the loose, patient way he carries himself comes across as cautious rather than dictorian. The creases across his chin make it seem as if someone has chiseled a permanent frown into the place of his mouth. His expression suggests war veteran but his casual, yet adroit stance screams high school coach. He immediately strikes Neil as another individual to be prudent of, and Neil is starting to think that might just be the case with every single one of Andrew and Renee’s people.

The man stops dead in his tracks at the sight of Neil, before glancing back at Renee.

“Bloody hell, kid,” he shakes his head. “This better be good.”

In a case of pure irony—it turns out they call themselves the Foxes. Neil doesn’t think he really gets the fascination with animal imagery. Even though Wymack seems to be in the highest position of authority, it occurs to Neil that people don’t seem to question Renee, that they trust her judgement above all ocular evidence; add that to the list of reasons she greatly unsettles him. If he were Wymack, he’d be circumspect of himself too, he _had_ crawled out of a swamp equipped to loot them after all.

When Wymack shoots him a distrustful eye, Renee sweeps in and insists on protecting his cause. Renee’s reassuring tone and soothing mien leaves a bad taste in his mouth and Neil doesn’t know quite what to make of it. She doesn’t appear unintelligent, so why is she blindly putting all of this faith in him? Why is she standing up for him? He never wants to owe anybody anything, especially not someone he can’t make heads or tails of.

“You reek like a sewer, son. Why don’t you go take a shower and let Abby here have a quick look at you? Don’t worry—it’ll just be a regular medical check up. Noticed you’re putting quite the pressure on your left leg,” Wymack says. Neil finds it difficult to deny the proposal of a shower after making that rancid subway journey. “How’d you injure it?” Wymack continues.

“Long story.” Neil murmurs, not that he's interested in telling it.

Renee spurs him on. “Get yourself cleaned up. We’ll be here when you’re done.”

“My duffel bag,” Neil reminds, watching Renee keenly as she gets revved up to fruitlessly justify Neil’s being here. She glances back at him over her shoulder and nods. “I’ll speak to Andrew. You don’t have anything to worry about.” Neil has plenty to worry about, but he’ll be damned if he isn’t going to take advantage of their facilities when he can’t even remember the last time he had a real shower. Renee suggests having a conversation in private and Wymack agrees, sending Neil off to the infirmary and then upstairs to one of the rooms. He follows Abby—apparently the Foxes’ unofficial caretaker and nurse—up to the infirmary where he evades all of her questions and allows her to patch his injury up.

Abby has warm eyes and an amicable face, but there’s a certain tiredness about her, as if she’s been teetering at the edge of her rope lately. It’s a notion that Neil recognizes very well. There is something else too—like she’s driven by some prominent, unspoken force. That too, is uncomfortably familiar. Neil can’t decide whether it’s admirable or all too upstanding. He’s never been overly fond of virtuous people, not when their good intentions always seem to bite them in the ass.

What’s the point of being a good person in a world that’s constantly telling you that nobility gets you nowhere?

Neil’s heart speeds up in his chest as Abby begins to examine him as soon as she’s finished patching up his injured leg. Abby hones in on the tenseness of his posture and draws her eyebrows up. “When’s the last time you had the chance to see a doctor?”

“A long time ago.”

“Out of scarcity of practitioners or a general dislike?”

“Both.”

“Don’t like doctors?”

“Doctors don’t like me. Is it really necessary?”

“You’re not going to be able to stick around here until I sign off on you, so yes.”

Neil relents and allows her to perform a series of tests from reflex to blood pressure. She takes two vials of blood from his clean arm, labels them and locks them in a drawer. Her eyes widen when she notices the bite, the skin there is heavily irritated and purpled with dried up blood. There are indents of teeth still prominent above his veins and a thin fold of skin ripped open to reveal a clotting of lacerated flesh. Her fingers trace his forearm but Neil wrenches out of her grip. “It shouldn’t be possible…” she mutters, more to herself than to Neil, before a steely resignation washes over her features. “Neil, it’s very important that you let me have a proper look at that.”

“Can’t we do this later?”

“I just want to vet it for now. I have to guarantee you aren’t putting anyone’s health here at risk. Alright?” Begrudgingly, Neil nods and allows Abby to take his arm again. Once she’s verified that he truly isn’t going to infect everyone he breathes on or whatever, she lets him go, perhaps picking up on his unease. She doesn’t say anything as she leads the way up to the rooms. Neil for one, is happy to indulge her silence. The look on her face when she’d finished up with his check-up haunts him, like a child convinced they’d encountered a ghost. The rattled expression doesn’t leave her face as she swipes a key card and lets him into one of the rooms on the far corner of the fourth floor. 

“Why isn’t the third floor in use?” Neil asks.

“There’s a giant hole blown through the middle of it, makes for quite a nasty fall.”

The dorm room is satisfactory, with a bunk bed crammed into the wall, a study table equipped with a desk lamp and a small bathroom towards the left. There is a little square window above the bed that is hidden behind a shabby pair of threadbare curtains, and by the bedside, a scratched up wooden closet with a broken bottom drawer. 

“Neil, I’m going to leave you to it now. We have warm running water in the bathroom and there’ll be fresh clothes for you when you’re done. Let me know if you need anything else.”

“Thank you.”

“Someone will be here to collect you in half an hour. Is that sufficient time?”

“Sure.”

Abby nods, before pausing in the doorframe and turning to look at him again. There’s a certain curiosity playing at her lips, one that sends Neil’s nerves into an irritated frenzy. “If you—“ she begins before Neil cuts her off. “Can you shut the door on your way out?”

Abby falls quiet for a minute, before swallowing whatever it was she wanted to say, nodding and exiting the room, leaving Neil alone with his thoughts. He takes a moment to lean against the cold wall and breathe a tired sigh, with his brain reduced to a carousel of whirling thoughts. Renee's saccharine smile. The phantom pang of pain in his gut from where Andrew landed a hit on him. Wymack's dubious and yet seemingly _knowing_ gaze. Neil has no idea what he's gotten himself into, or if he's riding the deceptive high of a ludicrous whim. Even though he just got patched up, his limbs feel so useless he can barely cross the distance to the bathroom door. He gives himself another indulgent moment of rest before he pushes himself off the wall and stumbles into the bathroom. 

Neil had almost forgotten the simplistic pleasure of a good shower, the meditative feeling of tipping his head back into the water and closing his eyes. The water feels like a remedy on his agitated skin, all of his muscles are sore but everything hurts a little less under the pitter-pattering pressure. He wonders where they’re sourcing it from. If his mental map is accurate, there’s an old dam nearby, it’s probable that’s what they’re relying on for both electricity and water. It’s kind of a wonder the Butcher’s men haven’t ambushed, usurped and slaughtered them all yet. By the looks of it, the Foxes are too small a bunch to have an entire university campus all too themselves, even if they’re rationing all of their resources. Their sustenance is impressive, but Neil figures it’s only a matter of time until the Butcher gets wind of it. There’s a part of Neil that almost wishes to warn them, but it’s not worth the weight on his wafer-thin conscience. He can’t afford to be looking out for anyone besides himself, plus, they seem like they’re resilient enough to be capable of handling themselves.

Neil swathes a towel around his middle and steps out of the bathroom. The air is a cold shock against his skin after being subjected to so much steam, and he wraps his arms around himself before he pulls on the pair of clothes laid out for him on the edge of the bottom bunk. They're a contradiction of soft and crackled under his hands. Soft from age and use, but the burnt fabric on the side is rough against his palm, looking like cancer on the orange fabric. The jeans are a little loose, falling around his ankle. They would be a pain to run in, but they were an upgrade. He takes a minute to put on his brown contacts and runs a hand through the wet clumps of his hair before collapsing down on the bed.

Everything inside him unwinds for a moment and he sinks into the sheets, which smell pleasantly like lime detergent and dust bunnies. Warm, comfortable—he's flooded with a rush of unfamiliar feelings. He wants to close his eyes and never wake up. His head hurts and he sees her when he falls asleep. He doesn’t know what he’s doing and he’s misplaced and he misses her. He even misses her stern gaze and blind disregard for his feelings, including the knowledge that she only ever wrapped her arms around him to keep him in line. He keeps telling himself it’s his fault. If he was just faster. If he’d tried harder. If he’d grabbed her hand and pulled her out of danger like some comic book hero. She’d been fast, but not fast enough. She’d looked him square in the eye, like she’d known it was coming. As if she’d always known. The truth was brutal and laid bare as her corpse in front of him. Wet with blood and wet with seawater and her clothes, too, wet with his tears. His throat was hoarse from keeping the screams bottled up all day and all week. If he’d just found another way. If he’d never left her side. _If he’d died instead._

It feels like Neil only gets a second of rest before he hears a soft knock on the door. Despite the need to stay chained to the bed for another hour or fifteen, Neil pulls himself up and swings the door open. Abby offers him a unassuming smile. “Feeling refreshed? You clean up well.” Neil just shrugs in response and she leads him back downstairs to the cafeteria without another word. Neil can’t keep from gritting his teeth as they make their way back, and his belly turns unpleasantly. The anxiety is beginning to brew up a noxious syrup inside him. He _needs_ that duffel bag back. Neil remains slouched and small on Abby’s heel as she pulls the double doors open and leads him inside. His arrival catapults every heedful eye in the room to him, and Neil feels an egging sense of discomfiture. He never signed up for all this unwanted attention, and there are definitely more people here than there were when he’d left the room.

The girl from the watchtower is sidled up to Wymack with her arms crossed over her chest, and Renee by her side. There’s a blonde girl Neil doesn't recognize seated with her legs crossed gracefully over one another, perched on one of the dining tables. It’s a little difficult not to notice her striking beauty, demanding attention while still being effortless; or the prominent curves of her body—like a magazine cut-out come to life. Her lips are pursed together in dismay as her sharp gaze scans him like there’s a fly in her tea.

There’s others: a man with a number two tattoo marking his cheekbone, sporting an unflattering scowl. Neil doesn’t know if he's imagining it, if it's his grating posture or the way he’s got his dark eyebrows knitted together in scrutiny, but he seems to bear a faint resemblance to the Foxes’ leader. He sits on one of the chairs with his spine all-too straight next to another man, who has a casual arm thrown over the base of his chair. He has long legs and broad shoulders but there’s something mellow about him. His expression feels level-headed compared to everyone else’s evil eye. Neil ignores all of them and scours the room for Andrew, who seems to be seated at the very back of the cafeteria, separate from everyone else, with his head buried in a book.

It is Wymack who speaks up first. “Let’s get the introductions out of the way,” he points to each person individually. “That’s Dan, Matt and Kevin. Allison—" he frowns in the direction of the blonde "—who apparently likes to disrupt building property, and that’s Andrew’s twin, Aaron, pretending like he doesn’t know us in the back there.”

_So Andrew has a brother._

“All right,” Wymack says. “I’m going to cut right to the chase considering nobody seems to be in the mood to prolong this shitshow. We have come to a consensus.” 

“This is bullshit,” Neil’s eyes swivel to the blonde—Allison, her mouth curling to form a diamond-teethed sneer. “He shouldn’t be here.”  

“Seconded,” mumbles an unenthused voice from behind his thick book. Neil frowns. He squints to read the title of Aaron’s book— _Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science._

“The freak’s a flight risk,” she adds. “Or he could be a government mole—a test of some kind.”

“Now that makes you sound like the freak,” utters Matt, coolly. Allison responds to this by shooting him a seething glare. "Fine. Here’s a more logical argument. He’s a _drain_ on our resources.”

“Stow that,” Wymack snaps. “Put simply, you have a couple of options. The first,” he begins, taking a step forward. “You can crash here tonight. It’s getting dark and weather’s gonna be a bitch out. In the morning, you can stack up on some supplies and your things will be returned to you. You can be on your merry way as long as you can assure us you’ll play amnesiac and forget you ever encountered us. Or…" he pauses, before clearing his throat. "You can stay. It isn’t like we lack in space.”

Aaron offers Neil a once-over before going back to his book, seemingly least interested in what Wymack has to say. Dan’s expression is taut, as if she’s mulling the whole predicament over but hasn’t formed an opinion on it yet. Matt looks thoughtful and unbiased as he offers Neil a small, reassuring smile from across the room. Neil finds himself unable, but aching to return it.

“Allison,” Dan’s tone is a cudgel. “Be reasonable.”

“I understand where you’re coming from,” Renee begins, but Allison gets to her feet and stabs an accusatory finger in her direction. Neil can't help but find himself weirdly impressed by how she demands attention from the room. Everything about her is tenacious; feverish. He bets Allison is the breed of dangerous girl his mother used to warn him about. "You people are the ones who aren’t being reasonable! What fairytale world do you live in? _You saw what happened to him…_ ” her voice shrinks to a bead of pain and for a moment, she fumbles for composure. “You were all _there_. Why the fuck are we lining up to be a bunch of do-gooders? If he really is immune, that’s someone else’s headache. We shouldn’t have to deal with this liability on our hands. I don’t care if he’s your miracle cure. Don’t you see? It’s too late for anything to get better. This is the world we live in now. _You_ should stop floating around in your denial and come back down to earth already.” She lets out a derisive laugh. “Cure for humankind. Right. Give me a fucking break.” At this point, Allison’s shoulders are heaving with fury. Renee instantly appears at her side, wrapping a gentle hand around her wrist and mumbling something to her in soothing tones, outside of Neil’s earshot.

“Uh, Wymack?” Matt pipes up. “Maybe we should wait for the others to get back, before making any hasty decisions?”

“He can’t leave,” says Kevin, his voice resolute as he laser-focuses his gaze on Neil. “If he opens his mouth about us to anyone out there, we’re _fucked_.”

“We can’t let him go and we can’t let him stay. Is Plan C to kill him?” drawls Aaron, without lifting his gaze from his book. Dan shoots him an angry look. “Quit jerking around. This is serious.” She glances up. “Wymack, I think Matt and Kevin both make excellent points. We can’t exactly risk letting him skip off and run his mouth.”

“I won’t hold someone here against their will.”

“Your morale is worthless and isn’t helping anybody.” Kevin growls.

Wymack doesn’t miss a beat. “That makes it about equivalent to your opinion, then. Shut the fuck up and sit down.” There’s a sudden thud and the cafeteria doors slam open. The mood within the room seems to shift and gravitate towards the newest arrival.

“Oh,” Andrew says. “Am I late to the party?” Neil notices there’s something wrong with Andrew’s face. The honed awnings of his cheekbones look highly flushed, as if he’s been ill recently. His pale curls cling flatly to his damp forehead. His eyes are vacant and half-lidded. He is quieter than earlier and rather jagged, as if the energy it takes just to speak is hardly worth it.

“Oh, David,” Andrew’s expression is neutral, his voice toneless and yet his intentions seem fairly clear. “He isn’t going anywhere. Isn’t that right, Neil?”

“I think it’s in everyone’s best interests if I leave.” Neil remarks. “I won’t rat you out.”

“And we’ll just take your word for it.” Allison says, heatedly. “Pack you a PB&J for the road and send you on your merry way.”

“I have nothing to gain from compromising you,” Neil pushes. “What you people do here is none of my business. I’m not affiliated with anything here. Nor am I affiliated with anyone outside of this. I’m not with the government, and I don’t belong to any factions. I’m nobody. I just want to be left alone. I don’t know what else to tell you.”

“The moment you stepped onto _our_ grounds, you became affiliated.” Kevin snaps.

“How did you fly by the military’s radar for so long anyway?” Matt asks.

“How did _you?”_ Neil challenges. “This campus should be a hotbed for military activity."

“Oops,” Andrew cuts in. “What a boring debate. I can make this go faster.”

Andrew walks up to Neil and wraps cold fingers around the back of his neck, sending hot bolts of dread up Neil’s spine. Neil is so taken aback that he’s shocked into cooperative stillness. The skin over his fingers is rough and his breath is warm on Neil’s face. Andrew’s voice is heatless, but Neil can still somehow hear the tinged sincerity in his words. They sound like a whispered promise. _“You stay or you die.”_

Neil wants to respond, wants to stifle this unsettling feeling. This constriction of being utterly trapped with nowhere to run. His feet itch with the desire to split. Neil wants to grab Andrew by the arm and slam his face into the—

There’s a sudden earsplitting shriek, heavy footsteps pound against the marble floors and someone comes crashing through the wide-open doors. Neil’s head snaps in the direction of the chaos and his eyes zero on the new visitor—a girl with her pupils blown wide and a face rendered ashen. Andrew stills next to him while his brother is already on his feet, and crossing the room so fast that his movements become a blur.

“Katelyn. Are you hurt?” Aaron’s voice is precise and critical as he takes the girl’s face in his hands. The girl nods no, and leans into his touch for a moment, before turning to Wymack. Neil can tell from how badly her knees are shaking that she’s barely keeping it together. There’s an earthquake behind her eyes.

“Nicky—he—and _Erik_ —didn’t—but he can’t— _Help!”_ she stumbles over words that come out largely as choked gasps.

“Give her space,” bellows Wymack. “ _Back up_ , give her space.”

The girl—Katelyn, slowly peels herself out of Aaron’s grasp and turns on her heel. “Down the hall,” she swallows. “I—I need help with Nicky.” Wymack is quick on his feet as he nods and mutters something to Dan under his breath, before dashing down the hallway. Dan asks everyone to hold back as Renee crouches down next to Aaron, by Katelyn’s side, and tries to calm her down. Cool fingers disappear off his neck and drift away. Neil turns around to find that Andrew’s gone. He can hear muffled wails rising up from the hallway. He slips out in the direction Wymack took. It occurs to him that right now would be a perfect time to make an escape, while everyone’s distracted and the attention, for once, is off of him. He makes it as far as the door frame before barreling head-on into someone’s chest.

Kevin’s expression is venomous and all teeth. “Don’t even think about it.”

“I just want to see what the commotion is about.” Neil shoots Kevin the filthiest look he can manage and tries to push past him, but the man’s grip on his shoulder morphs into a death-lock, so Neil just kicks on, with a murderous Kevin attached to him. They skid to an abrupt stop at the grueling sight.

Andrew is crouched down in front of a man who’s lying with his back barely slumped against the wall, as if it’s too much to hold his own body weight up. His dark bangs are plastered to his sweaty forehead and there’s a mean looking gash spreading from the corner of his jaw down to his neck. Andrew’s gaze is steady on the man’s—who’s sobbing so hard his words sound like incomprehensible garble. Blood soaks all the way through, from the front of his shirt to the tips of his boots, leaving dark impressions on the cream-colored walls and white-tiled floor.

Andrew is saying something to the man, but Neil can’t quite make out the words. Wymack stands a couple of feet away, supervising the situation with an intent eye, but avoiding intervention. Everyone seems to be holding their breaths. The man’s awful shrieks are all that fractures the majority of the silence. Behind him, Katelyn’s face is contorted in pain. She breathes heavily as she quietly explains whatever went down to Aaron, who has his arms buckled firmly around her shoulders, and a concerned gaze locked on the crying man in front of him.

Neil feels disoriented and wrong, like he isn’t allowed to be here, as if he's walked in on a stranger’s funeral. Andrew stands up when the man’s bawling finally reduces to audible sniffles. “How did it happen?” Wymack asks, a terrible grimness alight in his eyes.

Andrew’s face is unreadable. “It is not worth asking how.”

Some sort of understanding flashes behind Wymack’s eyes, as Andrew lets out a long sigh and says, “I’ll handle this mess. Tell the rest of the busybodies to clear out.”

Neil is equal parts intrigued and irked—how does he get off just making demands of people left, right and centre like that? It’s even weirder when Wymack actually nods and does as Andrew tells him, as if the jury has spoken. Renee and Dan have already cleared a path. Wymack ushers the rest of the Foxes, all of whom look varying levels of horrified, out of the hallway with a quick wave of the hand.

“Okay, people. Let’s go, on your feet. Abby,” he continues. “He needs immediate medical attention.”

Kevin grips onto Neil’s shoulder harder and squeezes—not a gentle gesture, but a warning one. “Let’s go,” Kevin says, at his ear. Neil tries to shake him off, but his grip only worsens, bad enough now that he could dislocate Neil’s shoulder if he applied the right pressure and twisted.

“Neil stays,” Andrew mutters, without actually looking at either of them.

“But—“ Kevin looks alarmed.

“Let it stand as his first strike.”

“Wait a second,” Neil snaps. “You think this is my fault?”

The other man’s tone is acutely bored. “Do you?”

“This has nothing to do with me.”

“In that case,” Andrew’s blank stare is somehow permeating. “Welcome to your new home, Neil."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please do leave me a comment if you liked it, it genuinely means so much & motivates me to keep this project going. thank you for reading! 
> 
> feel free to hmu on [tumblr](http://winterblues.tumblr.com) & let's chat about these foxy kids


	3. nights

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> there's a POV change, hence the regrettably short length of this chapter, but i'll make up for it in the next one ^_^

_You find only the shape you already are, but what if you have forgotten that or discover you have never known._  
_\- Looking In A Mirror, Maragret Atwood_

* * *

Neil spends his first week at Palmetto in a groggy, sleep deprived stupor. The Foxes are in mourning after the sudden fall of a comrade. They seem to be finding it difficult to get their mouths around the name—Erik Klose. He’d been on a routine patrol with the others, when he separated from the group to scale the perimeters of an abandoned pharmaceutical factory.

The grim story only relayed itself in traumatized bits and pieces, but the cause of death is crystal clear. Erik Klose ventured astray and got overwhelmed by a horde. There isn't a body left to bring back.

The man seems to have been especially close with Nicky, who’s become so wrecked by Erik’s death that he’s resigned to a practically vegetative state. He straight up refuses to participate in his duties and locks himself up in his bedroom all day. Neil hears his broken cries whenever he walks past his door. He doesn't bother to offer up support, despite the dull, surprising pang of sympathy that stirs in him. It's not his business.

In order to protect their backs, the Foxes have to shuffle tasks around and keep the momentum going. Wymack put it aptly: “The world won’t stop to let us catch our breath, and it certainly won’t wait us out while we mope around feeling goddamn sorry for ourselves. Now, I know how fucked up you all must feel. This is a hard blow. Erik was a good man. A capable man who did not deserve what was coming to him. That said, we would be letting a comrade down if we didn’t take this as all the more reason to toughen up and strengthen our guard. Got it?”

Neil finds the foxes’ reaction interesting, being a survivor in this world should automatically entail little to no mind over an occurrence as commonplace as the death of a comrade.

The Foxes however, mourn like a family.

They held a wake for Erik on Nicky’s request, and carried on even after Nicky broke-down halfway through until he had to be ushered away, with Abby quick but wordless on his heels. Neil knows he should find it foolish of them, instead he’s left muling over the endless list of reasons why it would never occur to anybody to hold a wake, had it been him. He’ll just disappear like a stain wiped off of glass or a stray eyelash. 

Erik’s sudden demise and Nicky’s worsening condition steal the spotlight from Neil, which means he’s left to his own devices for the most part. Wymack lets him know early on that the Foxes run on a strict give and take system. “Everyone here has something to contribute. Understood? You gotta earn your keep, kid.”

Neil is relegated to on-site tasks like helping Abby feed the livestock in the mornings, dusting and mopping, or aiding Renee and Matt with inventory and upkeep at the armoury. Neil can’t say he blames them for not trusting him with weightier tasks. The jobs keep him occupied, and he knows how to mind his own; he’s lived like a fly on the wall before, like a flighty body without a voice. Still, it’s an isolating feeling—to stand inside of a circle and still find himself on the outlines of it.

Neil does his best to avoid crossing paths with an incendiary Kevin, who keeps shooting him nasty, untrusting glares and making hostile comments-sometimes in French. Neil has to bite down hard on his tongue to keep from lashing out in his own string of perfect French. Not to mention he can feel the shape of Andrew’s blood-warm shadow like a target on his back, even when the other man is not within his field of vision.   
  
Neil’s bed is a pillar of comfort in comparison to the threadbare mattresses he is used to, but that comfort factor in itself is alarming. It feels like the silence that falls right before something terrible is about to happen—like the first shot fired or frantic birds before an earthquake. The nights are rigid and unfairly long. The dreams have gotten a hundred times worse. She is calling out for him, her skin is so cold, her eyes are dead stars, and there are ashes dotting the air like bacteria. His heart trundles in the cage of his chest and he wakes with a jolt, his breaths shattering beneath him, bile rising in his throat like an unidentified emotion trying to claw itself out. He has to drag his cold feet to the bathroom and empty the contents of his stomach before he can breathe normally again.

There is a hard rap on his door. Neil’s heart seizes entirely. As he attempts to motivate his voice to work, the door cracks open an inch; and a block of dim brightness floods into the room. Neil sees him in the pink afterburn, the dark length of his silhouette a bitter contrast to the imposing light. He takes another step inside and the door whines shut behind him. The sound feels startlingly loud in the quiet of the night, save for the cicadas trilling outside and the low moans of the undead—now an inescapable soundtrack no matter where Neil goes.

They’re thrust into darkness once again, but the moon-soaked glare from Neil’s window allows the faintest sliver to underline a thin, willowy scar on Andrew’s left hand and nothing else.

Neil has no idea why he’d be here—sliding into his room like a ghostly visitor at such a late hour, but he doesn’t dare ask. He digs his front teeth into the flesh of his bottom lip.

“You are yesterday’s news,” the words are low and lack energy, and yet they shoot through the room like a bullet. “Will you take that as an opportunity?”

When Neil’s tongue unsticks, he tries to locate Andrew’s eyes in the dark.

 _Look a man in the eye for long enough and you might just rip his heart out. Come to learn his weaknesses and fears intimately, so that when you land your next jab, it slips like a knife through a warm slab of butter_ —it was something his mother had taught him years ago.

In hindsight, it’s pretty shitty advice.

“With you breathing down my neck? I wouldn’t dream of it.” Neil can feel his movements, even if he can’t see them as well as he would have liked. Andrew, dressed in his obligatory black, merges unfairly well with the hazy shadows that swim around them. There is a sound like a split tile beneath Andrew’s boot. “I do not believe you.”

Neil can’t tell if it’s on purpose or not, but the tone of Andrew’s voice grates like a scratched cheek, as if abrasive from disuse.

“That’s your problem,” Neil says, calmly. He does not feel calm. He’s irritable from lack of sleep and his neck is stiff as rock and the midnight fog might be severely clouding his judgement. Not to mention he needs to stay on guard, Andrew may be subdued for now, but Neil is no stranger to his abrupt penchant for violence.

“Are you here to kill me?” he continues, when Andrew says nothing. 

“Curious,” Andrew’s words sound up close, and Neil knows he’s shifting steadily nearer. He can’t help but feel like a portion of meat being pursued by a starved hawk. “You sound underwhelmed by the notion of certain death.”

“In your words, it’s yesterday’s news,” Neil murmurs. “The dead walk now.”

“You must relate. Dead man walking,” Andrew slurs, as a band of light curls sloppily over the tip of his ear.

“I don’t know what you’re insinuating,” Neil is adamantly reticent, despite the fact that Andrew is still keeping his duffel bag hostage, despite the certainty that Andrew must have put the pieces together by now. It isn’t what bothers him, not anymore. Neil recognizes something he can’t quite name in Andrew’s particular breed of antagonism. It feels oddly familiar and yet, irritatingly alien. It makes Neil’s breath catch and the hair at the back of his neck stand on end.

Neil is not afraid—being unsettled and afraid are not the same thing. If Andrew was going to kill Neil for every layer of skin he’d peeled back in that duffel, he would have done it without ceremony. Andrew avoids the edge of Neil’s bed and halts a threadbare inch or two away from where Neil stands. He smells like cigarette smoke and breathes with his mouth closed. Neil takes note of the elastic reaction as Andrew’s finger curls in the front collar of his shirt. It is bait caught on a hook, but skin does not connect with skin. He doesn’t know how to move; pegged like a dart to an unfamiliar board.

“To answer your question,” Neil does not understand how Andrew can manage sounding so flat, while having Neil pinned down, bug-like under his thumb. “I am not here to kill you today,”

Neil feels his collar retreat with a soft smack against his throat. The body heat turns to cool air. Neil’s pulse is so rapid, he’s pretty sure he can feel it sounding off in his _brain_.

“Do not make me regret it.” Andrew says. He leaves the door ajar with his departure—almost as if in longing.

+

A week later, there’s another knock on his door.

Neil can’t sleep again, so he sits at the miniature desk aimlessly sketching. It’s a habit he picked up as a child and never quite let go of, and it helps settle the dust clogging his mind. He idly draws the curve of his mother’s chin as she takes a drag from her cigarette, an old pair of sneakers he left in Baltimore, the hard ends of the racquet Andrew seems to favor as a weapon, the crucifix Renee wears at the base of her throat and the upper outline of Wymack’s tribal flame tattoo. All punctuated by a mini army of stylized fox paws.

Neil does not bother dragging himself up, he keeps the door unlocked because he knows Andrew might show up for an inspection at some point. He’s sapped of energy from a new round of medical tests he’d been subjected to, upon Abby’s insistence.

His footsteps are quieter this time. The feeble lamplight dilates to mottles of gold over the edges of Andrew’s face. He rounds the desk and Neil attempts to keep his spine in place when he feels the presence of a hand over the cool wooden hilt of his chair.

“What is this?” Andrew asks, vaguely gesturing towards the musty spiral notebook Neil had borrowed from the infirmary. Neil wonders if he’s imagining the hint of interest he hears.

“I’m not sure,” Neil mutters. “I couldn’t sleep.”

Andrew is silent for a minute, his grip still strong on the back of Neil’s chair.

Between the quiet, Neil hears him inhale and the small damp pop of his lips parting. “I hear your tests went poorly, although Renee tells me she is still convinced you are a sanctified miracle. Tomorrow you may even wake to a shrine,” he breathes.

Neil puts his pencil down and turns his head. “And what do _you_ think?”

“I think you are nothing but a stray we happened to pick up, instead of logically putting down.”

“I don’t believe in gods and miracles, so you’re probably right.”

“You will not be of any use once their curiosity dies.”

“Does curiosity die, or does it get killed?” Neil counters.

Andrew’s knuckles accidentally graze Neil’s hair as he drops his hand back to his side. "Tomorrow morning, at eleven. Be at the main gate.” He is halfway across the room when Neil calls after him.

“Where are we going to go?”

Andrew considers this with a stale glance, like it should be obvious, before he vanishes through the door.

Neil doesn’t quite get his answer.

+

The mornings are waxen and freezing, the sun muzzled by great mounds of clouds as it steadily dips into winter, the streets all taking on the washed-out gleam of hospital beds. Andrew drags Neil on patrol with him, he allows Neil a single shiv and stays on Neil’s heel the entire time. He must be confident about his own knife skills. Andrew does not seem like a man who takes risks lightly.

Ironic, because he seems to prefer the use of his racquet over that of firearms or even the blades he’s so attached to. It’s smart, considering guns are loud and flashy and attract the dead like raging moths.

Andrew doesn’t breathe a word but Neil knows better than to attempt escape, no matter how much his heart pounds with the desire to flee or the patience it takes to remain stagnant; when his feet mutate into itches he knows better than to scratch.

This is a test. Andrew is giving him an opening. The cake is right there in front of him, plentiful and tempting, but taking a bite would cement the doubt in Andrew’s mind and end in a knife wedged into Neil’s throat. He plays Andrew’s twisted little game. He doesn’t provide an inch. He stays put like he’s told. When they return to campus, Neil knows he’s made the right choice. So Andrew takes him out again the following day, and the day after that, until they fall into a practiced cat-mouse routine. They patrol. They clear the area of stragglers. They watch one another in silent incitement.

With Andrew providing the mold, and Neil unwilling to give it shape.  
  
+

Two months since Erik’s death. The Foxes have fallen back into order—more or less. Wymack keeps everyone on their toes, while Abby plays at pacifier. The weather takes a turn for the worst and thick rinds of snow barricade them inside for a week. Crawler activity dwindles, freezing their dead limbs in place; coincidentally offering them a moment’s respite. The Foxes have to make more supply trips than usual with all of their resources being burned out by the winter fairly quickly—not to mention with visibility at zero and hail raining down on them like fists, the trips are frigid and brutal.

Kaitlyn and Matt both catch hypothermia at one point, inciting Aaron and Dan to venture off on what Neil had been convinced would be a suicide mission for medication. They make it back intact with supplies in tow two days later, and Andrew erupts on Aaron in front of everyone at dinner.

Neil is learning things about the Foxes and their daily lives he hadn’t known before. Dan will draw blood if she doesn’t have her morning dose of caffeine., Kevin spends an unhealthy amount of time reading stacks upon stacks of history books—in plentiful supply considering this used to be a university, Andrew has such a sweet tooth that he apparently stores bottles of honey and boxes of powdered chocolate upstairs in his room. Matt and Dan rarely ever fight, but when they do, the rest of the team enjoys placing bets on who will lay their armor down first. In fact, it seems like they find it amusing to place bets on absolutely anything and everything.

He gets it. These days, entertainment is scarce.

They play for things like candy bars, scented candles, fancy toiletries and other inconsequential belongings like hats and jackets, or trinkets and shoes. Allison always tends to up the stakes, but ends up losing the hardest, in return. Renee seems to win whenever she participates. Aaron spends most of his time with Abby in the infirmary as her apprentice, and acts as medic in her stead if the need ever arises. Kaitlyn is so spirited that she won’t shut up about the world, and could possibly literally talk Neil’s ears off. It makes him wonder how she ended up with someone as aloof and unlikable as Aaron.

They have movie nights, even though the range of films are limited to the same seven tapes they managed to scrunch up. One of the films is in Russian, and the other in Japanese with Taiwanese subtitles, but it’s entertainment—and so the Foxes will take whatever they can get their hands on. There’s apparently a big pot in it for anyone who manages to find a working movie CD or cassette tape while they’re out on a supply run.

Abby cooks mouth wateringly delicious dishes when they’re lucky enough to have a fully stocked cabinet, Nicky’s got a stereo that he lets everyone borrow from time to time and Wymack provides the music—nineties rock renaissance, vintage metal hits and unbearable amounts of jazz.

Then there’s Andrew—Neil absorbs as much as he can about him. The fact that Andrew seems to dislike Kaitlyn with a passion, and that he does not speak a word to his brother unless absolutely necessary, that Nicky is his cousin, and he sticks to Kevin’s side like an anchor. Andrew does not seem to care about participating in vocational activities that do not involve the need for fortification, and only ever bothers with effort if someone else is compromised, or on Wymack’s repeated insistence.

Neil does not know what to make of it all anymore.

He cannot remember the last time he spent two months somewhere without interval. Palmetto State is beginning to feel dangerously familiar, like the crinkles in his mother’s eyes, and Neil knows it can all come crumbling down in a single, unprecedented instant. He also knows that if he doesn’t worm his way out of here soon, he might be at the risk of assimilating to it—this makeshift bomb shelter and the people who dwell within it.

He still has dreams of her, but some nights the face she wears is not her own, and he no longer recognizes the shade of her eyes. There’s other details, too, that begin to fade like old newspaper. The sound of her voice, has it always been that high-pitched? The budding feeling of her nails digging into his shoulder blade, like the teeth of a predator. The faint perfume she always smelled of, Neil can’t even seem to remember whether the scent was floral or spicy. Of course, there are parts of her that are burned into his brain—but even the best of memories seem to lead back to that lurid summer day at an ashen beach, her blood soaking his front, her death imminent.

This time, he brushes past Neil before the door can fully close shut behind him. His eyes are sharp on the frosted-over window. Bland snow somewhere beyond. The night outside is tinged a delirious blue, and it makes Andrew’s skin look a punch-drunk grey, like an image burned into paper.

“It’s no fun incarcerating a willing prisoner, you know.”

“Willing?” Neil raises an eyebrow. “I’ll be out of here before morning if you’re finally bored of trying to provoke me.”

Andrew’s moves are deliberate and mechanical as he darts a lingering glance his way. “Should I take your word for it?”

“Let’s stop beating around the bush. You know everything about me by now, don’t you?”

“Everything,” Andrew scoffs, softly. “What a shallow word.”

“I mean everything that was in the duffel.”

For a moment, the silence seems to be eating at his skin and tugging at his shirt. The wind outside rises like an out-of-tune choir. Neil bites down on his lip, and maybe he’s said too much. He waits for Andrew to make an about-face and withdraw wordlessly through the door; as if he was never here. He misses the blade.

Andrew buries one hand in his hair and flips a switchblade open with the other. The movement is so swift it doesn’t leave a single gap for retaliation. Neil takes a shuddering breath as the cool tip lingers along the bend of his collarbone and flits over the dip in his throat. He’s reeled abruptly backwards, but the grip in his hair persists, restraining him.

Andrew watches the lick of steel, as if he might be able to see Neil’s pulse cauterizing it.

“Provoke you?” he slithers. The point slopes lazily down over the apple of Neil’s throat. “A man who veils his identity,” 

Neil can feel it, a striked nerve, somewhere underneath the apathetic haze of his words.

“A man who shields himself in lies,” Neil swallows and the length of it ducks with the undulation of the movement, then rises with it. “A man whose continued breath is a mercy?”

It climbs over his chin and nudges at his bottom lip like an invitation to answer.

“That’s right,” Neil can barely form the words against the icy steel. “I am nothing. I am nobody. If I had a personality before all the fabrications, I don't remember it.” The slack-jawed words are the first truth he’s spoken out loud since his mother died. Andrew’s grip loosens enough for Neil to be able to talk, without risking a muddied lip.

“My life ended long before the world did. This is all that I am now,” Neil’s tone stretches uncomfortably, like a taut vein. Andrew considers him like one might consider a bug squashed underfoot.

“But if you try to kill me tonight, I will survive,” Neil adds, flatly. “It’s all I know how to do.”

The two men regard each other in stoic silence. The blade still rests against his jaw like jewellery, Andrew’s pupils are eclipsed and incomprehensible. Neil feels the air pinch and change in between them.

The cold tip disappears, to be replaced with gentle, lithe fingers navigating his jaw in a mirroring dance. Neil’s breath hitches faintly in his throat, and for the briefest, unsettling moment, Neil falls into the strangest lull, allowing the touch to govern all thought, or perhaps render it futile. Maybe it was cocky of Neil to assume that parting his lips against the warm brush of knuckles will not lead to an irked weight; choking the life from him.

Andrew’s gaze is a monument. His expression is still a dead-end, but for the first time, there’s almost something permeable in it. Andrew’s hand curves around the span of Neil’s neck and a calloused thumb lies aloft over Neil’s pulse point, where the switchblade had ventured breaths ago. Neil wonders if Andrew can feel it flying there, unable to take shape.

“You amuse me,” his words are too audible to be a whisper. “How troubling.”

“I’d hate to be an inconvenience,” Neil musters, even if his body has been rendered catatonic against the experimental lilt of Andrew’s hands.

Warmth bundles over his ear. “Me too.”

Neil’s chest wastes away as Andrew withdraws, honeysuckle eyes watchful and detached against the dark, moon-scabbed rust. It isn’t until the other man’s shadow peels off the floor that Neil tastes the barest suggestion of blood in his mouth.

+

There is a growing part of Neil that wonders if he might be caught up in a fever dream.

That perhaps in reality, he’s lying somewhere in a coma and dreaming his whole life up. The virus never spread, trimming the population off like diseased cattle, his mother never left him, and he never found himself at Palmetto State, within the homely ranks of the Foxes. Now that he’s beginning to have his first taste of stability—or as stable as he’s allowed to get, he finds himself unable, and fairly unwilling to let go.

Neil is caught up in a vulnerable moment, with a lit cigarette in hand and his gaze plastered to a faint sprinkling of stars, visible through his window against the stagnant pitch-black. He stares at the florid circle of flame that ebbs around his fingertips without feeling, his throat reduced to a dried up ravine. It’s been four months. Four months and he hasn’t left. So far, they haven’t been able to come up with a single concrete explanation for Neil’s ostensible immunity to the virus, but both Renee and Abby seem to be hellbent on delivering some kind of an answer. Aaron too, who always makes a point to remind Neil that if it weren’t for the satiation of his scientific curiosity, he wouldn’t touch Neil with a ten foot pole.

Neil should know better, he _does_ know better.

If he dares to stay, there will be consequences, and most likely corpses—a lot of them. If the tests are all proving futile, he should take it as his cue and pack his bags. It was a foolish venture to begin with, he got tangled up in false promises and enticing words. His life is never meant to be worth more than the dirt beneath his fingernails and the familiar embrace of asphalt. The shortening cigarette is a stale reminder of his hiccup, like a dead flower stalk he’s being forced to see crumble to dirt.

Andrew’s tone is detached and steady, ushering him to the present. “What a waste of nicotine,” he mutters. Neil watches as he wanders over to him and gently picks the cigarette from in between Neil’s fingertips. Andrew’s ring finger brushes the tip of Neil’s thumb for a heatwave of a second. Andrew puts the cigarette to his mouth, taking a long drag. Neil stares at all the juts and hollows in his neck as they work, glossy in the low sheen of the window. He waits for an exhale.

“Do you smoke to remember, or to forget?” Neil asks. He isn’t sure why the question is born, but Andrew shoots him a stray look he can’t decipher. “Do I get something in return for answering such an intrusive question?”

Neil frowns. “What do you mean?”

Andrew does not look at him as he takes another drag, focused instead on gathering the air in his lungs. His breaths, Neil notes, are abdominal, probably in order to achieve maximum effect; feel the circulation of the bad habit, of the poison, within his core.

Andrew’s eyelashes dip behind a slow-haze of smoke. “The truth is not for free.”

Neil understands the implication, he’s expecting a two-way street. Neil could lie, he should lie.

But: “They remind me of my mother,” the words are out before he can abolish them. Neil waits for the dread to take over, instead, he feels a knot in his stomach unwind—a knot the size of a peach pit that’d been steadily growing in size and threatening to override his system. Andrew slants a perfunctory look his way. “Where is she now?”

“Dead,”

“Did you kill her?” Neil feels a hole start to eat its way through his heart.

“No,” he says, darkly. “Your turn.”

Andrew’s next words sound like black coffee tastes. “Neither,” he ashes the used up stub out on the windowsill. “I do not intend to forget, and a reminder will do no good.”

“Why, then? Do you get a kick out of deliberately destroying your system?”

“Your quota is up.”

“What about your parents?” Neil asks. “I do not have parents,” Andrew recites, sounding utterly bored, as if Neil had enquired about something as mundane as the weather.

Neil has to bite down on his tongue to keep from asking a follow-up question. Andrew digs a finger into his cheek. “I will expect reimbursement for that piece of information.” Neil does not realize he’s holding his breath until he hears the door slide lazily shut behind him.

When did Neil grow to become so curious about this man, who shows up, like a ship in the night?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for reading!

**Author's Note:**

> please leave me a comment & tell me what you think & thank you sm for reading!!
> 
> A/N:
> 
> i'm gonna be real w/ you guys, this started as just something a friend & i were gushing about, but now it's turned into sort of a beast. this is now shaping up to be a long multi-chapter fic so strap yourselves in if you liked it. 
> 
> ABOUT UPDATES: they may not be frequent. i will be upfront about this: i'm gonna try my best to finish this fic but so far i'm only a couple 'chapters' in and it's not any close to being complete. this will be a slow-burn in every sense of the word but if you guys stick with me i promise i'll do my best to make it worth it! i think a part of me decided to go ahead and post the first chapter (asides from testing the reception) so that i'll have more motivation to keep writing this and see this fic through till the end. i'd love for you guys to join me on this journey, though, as i've got a lot of things planned. 
> 
> IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS: please! ask away! i'm accepting all kinds, including suggestions, discussions + constructive criticism. you can leave me a comment below or just come and talk to me on [my tumblr](http://winterblues.tumblr.com) where i'll also be posting this story as it continues to develop.
> 
> the songs i was listening to while writing this if anyone's into it: Dirge (Everything Is Over Now) by Crywolf / Zombies by Childish Gambino / Human by Daughter / Dust and Bones by Night Terrors of 1927
> 
> i'll stop blithering like an idiot now. thanks again for reading! <3


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